BITS; Google Is Testing Video Ads

By SAUL HANSELL

Published: February 18, 2008

Google Is Testing Video Ads

Google has always had a love-hate relationship with advertising. Its power and wealth come from the $16 billion a year of advertising that it sells. Yet on its most important pages, the results from its Web search engine, it limits ads to nothing more garish than a dozen words of text.

That is about to change. On Thursday, Google started testing video ads on some pages of search results. And it is developing ad formats with images, interactive maps and other more elaborate features.

Marissa Mayer, above, Google's vice president for search products and user experience, said in an interview that the change reflects the evolution of the once-sparse Google pages. ''The big insight of Google wasn't text ads; it was that the ads should be conducive to the format,'' Ms. Mayer said. ''We were doing text-based search that was all textual. Visual ads don't work in that format.''

By contrast, she said, text ads are not as effective on pages with search results that include images and video. The eyes of users automatically gravitate to the images more than the text, she said. Now that Google's main search results pages include more elements like images and video links, it is more appropriate, she argued, to have corresponding advertising formats.

''We don't want all sorts of video and banner ads all over the site all the time,'' Ms. Mayer said. ''People who advertise a movie want to show a trailer. Why shouldn't they have the same format we use for search results and have a little plus box that says watch the trailer?'' SAUL HANSELL